A portable version of Google's Chrome browser

I'm a big fan of "portable" Windows software. The term refers to applications that can be executed without being installed.

From a Defensive Computing standpoint, they offer two big advantages. First, there is the minimal impact on the rest of the system - the registry doesn't know anything about the application and vise versa. Then too, portable applications can be backed up, a concept foreign to normally installed Windows applications.

An excellent source for portable applications is portableapps.com where John T. Haller and his team take normally installed Windows applications and package them in a portable format.

They don't, however, offer a portable version of Google's Chrome web browser. It turns out that a German software company, SRWare, does. They call their version Iron and it offers a host of advantages over Google's version.

The big thing that SRWare stresses is privacy. Iron protects your privacy in seven ways that Chrome that does not (see their Chrome vs. Iron page).

In addition, installing Iron (it's available both in a normally installed version as well as a portable version) does not install Google Updater, a program that seems to run constantly in the background.

Like Chrome, Iron is free and open source. It is currently available only for Windows, but a version for Linux and OS X is under development. From the release history it appears that development is fairly active. The latest stable version, from May 17, 2009, can be downloaded here. Note that the version available at download.com is old. 

To install the portable version of Iron, you first download a 14MB zip file. Then, unpack it into any folder, the total size will be about 30MB. To run it, doubleclick on IronPortable.exe in the root of the unpacked folder. 

If you already have Chrome installed, you shouldn't need to remove it to use the portable version of Iron. As a rule of thumb, a portable version of a program can exist on the same system as a regularly installed version - you just can't run them concurrently. 

An article last week at Make Tech Easier, Iron Browser: A Secure Alternative to Google Chrome, pointed up yet another advantage of Iron compared to Chrome - ad blocking. By simply downloading an adblock.ini file, Iron can block most ads, including the ads on the Make Tech Easier site itself. Portable Iron users need to put the downloaded adblock.ini file in the "iron" subfolder.

I haven't used Iron or Chrome very much, but a few things made a good first impression.

As do Internet Explorer and Firefox, Iron treats F11 as a toggle for full screen mode (a favorite thing among netbook users). It also responds to CTL-plus and CTL-minus to increase and decrease the font size. And rather than permanently assign a status bar at the bottom of the screen, when you hover the mouse over a link, the target of the link displays as a temporary pop-up at the bottom of the window.

On the other hand, it didn't take long before I ran across a web page that Iron could not display. Viewing this HP page, with drivers for one of their printers, results in the error shown below.The page displays fine in Firefox 3.5 and IE7.

Error 300 (net::ERR_INVALID_URL): Unknown error.

When the time comes to update the portable version of Iron, see Update Portable Iron Browser the Easy Way at the How-To Geek site for instructions.